Baby's Name Might "Shape" Baby's Face, New Research Finds

As if the pressure to name your baby isn’t enough — between fearing your mother-in-law’s reaction to picking a name you and your partner can just finally agree on. Oh, and then there’s the fact that your child will go by that name for…well…forever. But now, a new study adds more pressure to the mix: People might actually conform their facial features to fit the stereotypes of their birth name. Now naming your baby is really NBD because she’ll “grow into” it, eventually. Right?

What the study looked at

French and Israeli researchers hypothesized that a name impacts not only how a person is perceived, but that people adapt their facial features to fit the “look” of that name — what they call a “Dorian Gray” effect. In other words, a person is treated a certain way because of their given name, and they begin to conform their facial expressions to that treatment. Put another way, a name can actually "shape" a person's face.

The resulting set of eight studies, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, looked to test the relationship between a person’s name and appearance. In six of the studies, the researchers tested how well people in France and Israel could match up a photo of a face to a name. In two other studies, a computer analyzed several thousand photos of people and their names and had to perform that same photo-name matching task.

What researchers found

In one of the experiments, participants were able to accurately pair one of five names to a face 35 percent of the time. That’s significantly more often than the 20 percent odds they’d have of making the match at random. The trained computers were also more accurate at matching up names to faces. In fact, by looking for similarities around a person’s eyes or mouth — the areas of our face we can change the most using our facial muscles — computers could accurately guess a name about 60 percent of the time.

Interestingly, in other experiments, Israelis were more able to identify other Israelis by name but not French people; the inverse was true for French people who were shown photos of Israelis.

What the study means

The authors warn that this study just chips at the surface, and lots more research is needed to confirm that any of these name-face links actually exist. They say it's possible that there are other explanations, one of which could be that people are just really good at process of elimination — i.e. two of the five names on the list are easy to rule out, putting the odds smack at one in three.

Then there’s the explanation that may make the most sense: There could be a genetic component. Parents of a certain ethnicity are more likely to be drawn to some names over others, meaning names actually share similar physical, genetic traits (Patricks, let’s say, might be more likely to have fair Irish skin and blue eyes).

Or maybe it’s simply since babies often look like a mix of both Mom and Dad, parents just do a really good job of picking a name they actually deep down think would fit themselves.

Whatever the case may be, don't get hung up too much on these findings. In the end, you will pick a name that’s right for your baby. And if not, you can always change it.